


Criminal Negligence

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [22]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Consequences, Gen, Juvie, Lisa Doesn't End Up With Coil, Tinker Taylor, Villain Taylor Hebert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:06:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23040670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: The Brockton Bay Juvenile Parahuman Penitentiary is not a pleasant place to end up in, especially as a Tinker, but seeing as the alternative is being in the Wards, Taylor was willing to shoot herself in the foot to spite her own shoes.
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Kudos: 71





	Criminal Negligence

**Author's Note:**

> For the record, since it might not be totally clear, Taylor is a Drone Tinker. Capital D, with no restrictions (she can make drones, things which equip drones, or things that make other drones) besides everything being a drone and her inability to make people into drones or drones which are in the shape of people.
> 
> Think of this Taylor as a fusion of Bakuda and Taylor but with the icky bits disregarding bodily autonomy scraped away. She's a mess, in other words.

The Brockton Bay Juvenile Parahuman Penitentiary - or BBJPP to those who don’t want to spend half of their day saying the damn thing - was, in all likelihood, part of the reason why Brockton had such a high number of villainous capes. It was established back when the PRT was just getting started as a safer alternative to incarcerating parahumans in normal juvenile detention facilities, as well as a place to put people who triggered while they were in juvie, mostly to keep their identity as hidden as humanly possible and to lower the rate of revenge killings that tended to follow so-called ‘jail triggers’, which had been as high as 86% in a few states.  
  
Now, the thing with BBJPP is that it wasn’t just for capes in Brockton. Technically, BBJPP was the largest juvenile detention facility for those with powers on the planet, and it took parahumans from every state east of Nebraska, which was a not-insignificant amount, for the record. It was host to quite the number of parahumans, with specialized wings for certain types, as well as contingency plans in the event that someone gets free. It was about as secure as you could reasonably make it, but unfortunately, that wasn’t a _whole lot_. Parahumans that managed to escape BBJPP usually trickled back down into Brockton as a result, and they were usually solo villains, like Circus - apparently a transfer from New York, who escaped after beating one of the guards comatose and setting the Warden’s office on fire - because the majority of them couldn’t spring themselves on the drive over, or had friends who could do it for them; which was a more common retrieval tactic than you’d think.  
  
All-in-all, it was the place most juvenile criminals with powers went, and as it happened, Taylor was much the same.  
  
The Warden of BBJPP was a fat, balding man with hairy knuckles and a scowl all but carved into the folds of his face. He was as pale as the linoleum underneath the bowing legs of his chair and managed to both smell and appear as though he also had all the nicotine stains that came along with it. He wore his uniform immaculately, if not for a distended belly and general sense of uncleanliness, he might even be passingly threatening.  
  
His name was also Henry Dickenson, and that said just about everything Taylor ever needed to know about him.  
  
Her arrival had been - considering the amount of damage she’d done - relatively sedate. Nobody had arrived with her transport to shackle her with more complicated gear, nobody had breathed down her neck about ‘keeping her hands to herself’. Hell, not a single person had even tried to rough her up on the way through. They’d treated her like she wasn’t a little bit of freedom and a tack welder away from building something that would eat them and recycle their biomass for spare parts.  
  
Not that she’d make that. _Obviously_.  
  
She had to be on her _best_ behavior, which had all-in-all led her to here: in a cramped room with a smelly fat fucker who probably got himself off by intimidating teenagers with more power in one cell of their bodies than he’d ever have in his entire life. They’d been sitting in total and complete silence for the better part of five minutes at this point, and the urge to take the table, her shackles, the warden, and the ceiling light apart to create a rudimentary drone was starting to make her teeth itch.  
  
“Admin,” was what finally slurred out between the man’s lips, his stubble looking more like a crust, less like something someone might intentionally try to achieve.  
  
Taylor squirmed a bit, twisting her hands around to let her smooth the pad of her thumb over the rough underside of her shackles. “Warden Dick.”  
  
Warden Dickhead’s face clenched a bit, but not a lot. With looks like his, he’d probably had to develop a thick fucking skin, considering he ruled over a kingdom of traumatized teenagers with a variable ability to blow holes in people’s bodies. “We received warnings about your _behavior_ , and this meeting is mostly a formality while they prepare your cell and cellmate in the Winter wing.”  
  
Right, the Winter wing. It was an ominous place, going by rumors; the entirety of BBJPP was split up into five wings, winter for Tinkers and Thinkers with ‘cold’ countermeasures, no tech, no ability to talk to guards, only your fellow inmates. Tinkers got to tinker, admittedly, if only to avoid Tinkertech-fuelled revolts that usually ended up using confoam as rudimentary rocket propellant. It was staffed by whatever sad fuck of a Tinker got stationed there instead of a far more hospitable place, like Madison, a quarantine zone full of Ziz bombs, Case 53s, and sometime Ziz bomb Case 53s, or Eagleton, the location of the people-eating Machine Army which had a habit of camoflaguing itself as innocent-looking buildings.  
  
The other wings were in a similar vein, of sorts:  
  
Spring for Movers, Summer for ranged threats, Blasters and Shakers, Autumn for threats which were close-ranged, Strikers, Brutes, Changers, and lastly the ever-edgy black wing, made to house anyone too powerful, with too many powers, or with Trump abilities, usually because they couldn’t be conventionally restrained by countermeasures in the other wings.  
  
She’d seen all of the wings on the bus ride over, the building was more or less a huge ‘X’ with a circle where all the lines intersected and a fifth line branching off between the top two diagonal lines for the black wing. Each one of the wings were multi-floored, both above and below ground, and for all that their names might imply color and decorative habits, from the outside they were just tall rectangular concrete buildings with varying levels of armor plating and some colored trim.  
  
Going by the meeting room she was stuffed into, cramped and with uncomfortable chairs and rickety metal tables, her hopes that the wings might look better from the inside were pretty thoroughly quashed.  
  
Speaking of the inside, Taylor refocused back on the fat, balding man who would dictate her life for the next year and eight months, barring her getting less time for good behavior, and tilted her head to one side. “Who is my cellmate?”  
  
Warden Dicksnot smiled affably, gradually rising from his chair in a motion not unlike a cresting wave. “Oh, I’m sure you two will get along.”  
  
The door behind him opened, allowing two guards into an already cramped space, though the Warden waddled his fat ass right out the door the first second he could, folding his hands behind his back in what he must think was a refined pose, but really made him look like a recently-emasculated penguin.  
  
The guards gave her no space, not a new concept, but an unwelcome one nevertheless. Gloved fingers grabbed her shoulder and yanked her to her feet - this was the sort of treatment she’d been expecting coming in, really - and less directed, more dragged her around the table and out of the meeting room. The lobby was a familiar sight, she’d gone through here to get to the meeting room to begin with, but it wasn’t a pretty one. Harsh concrete floors, a tall cylindrical tower with five massive, reinforced doors leading to each wing. Two-dozen or so armed troopers watched her with weapons on-hand from the various recessed cubbies that lined the walls, hidden up to their chests by reinforced steel cover with little openings to stick the barrel of a gun through.  
  
One of the guards yanked her shoulder hard enough to send a pang of agony down her arm, hauling her towards the massive doors labelled ‘winter wing’. Someone snickered as she passed, one of the guards presumably, but another hushed him with a sharp, hiss-like noise. The entryway returned to a disquieting silence as the guard nearest to the reinforced doorway that wasn’t also escorting her reached out and pulled an aged-looking lever, a long series of heavy clunks and thuds shuddering out from some unseen mechanism buried in the walls. Finally, after a few more seconds of silence, a red light above the door flashed on, accompanied by a low, but unhurried, warning sound as the doors pulled apart, peeling open to the noise of unoiled hinges that made her skin crawl.  
  
What she was met with was not a corridor, not like she was thinking. It was a space made entirely out of metal with perfectly smooth, sloped surfaces. There was no sign of any openings besides the one she was about to enter through, no way to fit her fingers into compartments to pull apart the machinery. The closest comparison she could think of was if someone forged a massive sphere of steel and hollowed out the interior with sandpaper.  
  
One of the hands on her shoulder pulled away, reaching down onto her shackles. He inserted a series of four keys into four different slots, two of which Taylor had been almost one hundred percent sure had been just gaps between the metal, and turned each and every one of them. Her shackles fell away with a metallic screech, landing onto the concrete with an ear-ringing clash, and before she could question where they were taking her, firm hands were shoving her into the elevator. She stumbled into it with all the grace of a preschooler trying their hand at figure skating, twisting around to glare balefully at the pair of guards which had brought her in to begin with.  
  
The taller one - the one who had been on her right - raised his hand up and waved with his fingers. There was no way to tell his hair color, his age or even his face, as the uniform they wore came with a helmet that covered their features and an outfit that showed no skin, but Taylor got the impression he was smiling, the fucking bastard.  
  
“Enjoy your time in cold storage,” that same guard said, and before Taylor could demand to know what the fuck that was, the doors slammed shut, hissed, and then seemed to fill in the gaps where the two pieces met, leaving the surface once again perfectly smooth.  
  
There was a heavy clunk and a shift, and then the elevator started to descend.  
  
Huffing out a breath, Taylor restrained her first impulse to kick at the walls and see if anything gave, knowing that she would probably just hurt her foot instead.  
  
The descent was long, and with no real way to gauge how fast she was moving or how long it’d actually taken, she could be less than a floor below the one she just came from or at the core of the planet, for all she knew. Still, eventually the doors did hiss and slide open, and again she was at-odds with what she was expecting to find. There was nobody there to greet her, just a single square room with a closed metal door on the other end of it. Stepping into it once the elevator gave a warning beep, Taylor ignored the sound of metal-scraping-against-metal as the elevator shut behind her and began to ascend once again.  
  
“Welcome to the Winter Ward, floor eight,” an entirely-electronic voice spoke from some unseen source, the sound a mess of static and crackles. “Admin”—the voice was unfamiliar, but for a second it was a _person’s_ voice—“you have been assigned to cell eight-seven-two, which is at the very end of the upcoming corridor. Please make your way to it at a slow but continuous pace, or else countermeasures will activate to incapacitate you and move you there directly. Your welcoming package, including schedule, additional clothing, map and rules will be found on the ground beside the door to your cell. If you do not pick it up, the door will not open to allow you in, and countermeasures will be activated.”  
  
There was a pause.  
  
“Any and all attempts at disobedience will be met with countermeasures, but benefits for remaining a model inmate will be handed out at the end of every month. The staff of the Brockton Bay Juvenile Parahuman Penitentiary hope you will benefit from your stay.”  
  
The crackle of an intercom clicked off, and Taylor was left in silence once again. After a few more moments of dawdling, the reinforced steel door in front of her opened to the sound of a loud, screeching alarm, and not willing to find out about the full extent of the countermeasures, Taylor quickly made her way down the long, concrete corridor that would be her life for the foreseeable future. The cell doors were all perfectly solid, with no viewports she could see, and the floor and ceiling had a similar feel to the elevator; perfectly smooth, with no gaps or openings to fit anything into in hopes of scavenging something out of it. She was also pretty sure the rooms were soundproof, as if there was anyone in the cells, she sure as shit couldn’t hear them.  
  
After walking for a long enough time that she was starting to wonder if there was something in here that warped space and time, Taylor spotted her ‘welcome package’. It was a small pile of clothing, the same stretchy, skin-tight pants and shirts she was dressed in, all colored a drab grey with ice-blue trim around the collar, alongside a small bundle of papers. Her mind whirred with ideas immediately, it had been such a long time since she’d tinkered, and her fingers itched to start pulling the paper into pieces to be treated with something she could reasonably put together, only for the impulse to stop dead when, on the very top sheet, the words ‘Tinkering with supplies will result in allowed tinker privileges being revoked’ stared back up at her in big, bold red text. Smothering her disappointment and reminding herself they had free Tinkering periods, however restricted, Taylor leaned down as she approached, lifted the clothing and supplies into her arms, and then stepped in front of the door.  
  
The door opened with a surprisingly quiet and smooth noise, revealing her cell. It wasn’t big, but it wasn’t really small either; it had a concrete floor, with two beds on either side of the room with storage spaces at the foot of each. The roof was domed, for some bizarre reason, with a recessed light pushed far, far up into a hole. There was enough space that she could lay down between the two beds and be just shy of touching her fingers to one and her feet to another, and the two beds themselves were pointed in the same direction, meaning she’d be able to look off to the side and see her cellmate.  
  
Speaking of cellmates, her first thought when she saw her was abject confusion. For some reason, purple, what looked to be silk fucking sheets laid themselves over the same utilitarian bedframe her new bed was on. On top of the bed, cushioned by pillows, with hair pulled back into a tail, a blonde girl half-a-head-or-so shorter than herself with bright green eyes and an easy, prideful smile stared back at her. She looked relaxed, almost regal, and after glancing around the room a bit more, Taylor could put a name to the purple domino-masked girl’s face: Tattletale, engraved into a plaque above the head of her bed, just as Taylor’s ‘Admin’ was above hers.  
  
A loud, shrill warning noise jostled her out of her thoughts, pushing her to step through the threshold entirely and into the room. The door slid shut behind her, and with it the warning noise vanished entirely.  
  
Tattletale’s eyes roved unpleasantly up and down Taylor’s figure, but not with the same sort of heat you’d probably find in someone actually attracted to you. She was sizing her up, in a word, and Taylor _didn’t really fucking appreciate that._ No, for all that the attention made her happy, her getting powers having come from a lack of attention, an _irrelevancy_ that had corrupted every facet of her life after Emma stopped talking to her, when she realized she was so forgettable, so unimportant, that she wasn’t even worth bullying, this sort of attention, this picking her apart, was scraping down the same part of her mind that drove her to unleash her entire army of drones, the full breadth of her summer’s long work, all to rip apart Leet’s life, to make him _absolutely fucking sure_ who he was fucking with.  
  
Taylor smiled, and it was _all_ teeth. She kept her head turned to Tattletale as she entered the room in its entirety, approaching her own side of the room, dumping the clothes into the little bit of provided storage while placing the small packet of papers onto her bed. She reached out, curled her thumb through the rough, cotton fabric, before turning around and slumping into the unpleasantly hard surface of her mattress. Tattletale was still staring, still smug, though this time she looked more inquisitive, less like someone looking at the various bits and pieces they’d like to carve off of a particularly plump cow.  
  
“So, you’re Admin,” Tattletale said, her voice neither pleasant or unpleasant, though it had a distinct middle-American accent, one that was hard to find in Brockton Bay, for all that they didn’t have much of an Atlantic accent either. “It’s a pleasure.”  
  
“Likewise,” Taylor grit out.  
  
Tattletale smiled, big and wide and toothy, just like she had. “Don’t lie.” The expression on her face bled away, replaced with a curious half-pout, done with such an ease that Taylor was already somewhat regretting not taking her chances with the Wards and being around her shit father. “What do you do, anyway? I know you’re a Tinker, they don’t give those packets out to those of us who aren’t, but...”  
  
“I do drones,” which was true. She did drones, period. She had no limits to her drones, her drones could be anything, and ideas came to her with an ease that was apparently deeply unusual for most Tinkers. She had no real specialty besides that it had to be a drone, was used to make a drone, or was something which would augment one. She’d expected, actually, to have access to rodents or something while staying here, and she’d thought about putting together a highly-addictive drug that would raise her various rodents intelligence, getting them hooked on the shit and gradually conditioning them to gather materials for her to make better things, but going by the air tight facility, she doubted it.  
  
Which, speaking of. “What’s cold storage?”  
  
Tattletale blinked, apparently taken off-guard by that question. “It’s here, the lowest floor in the Winter wing,” she said slowly, glancing towards the door. “Zero guard-to-person interaction, unlike the minimal level of interaction they allow in the higher floors, twenty-four-seven observation of everything that goes on in the cell, restricted Tinker time for Tinkers, no cell-to-cell interactions outside of small periods of free time, and a few other odds and ends.”  
  
That was...  
  
“Worse than you were expecting, huh? Isn’t a whole lot like the juvie you see on the television, is it?” Tattletale smiled, all cat-with-the-canary, lazy and eager to see if Taylor could be a further source of amusement. “I get that, yeah. Cold storage is just what they call us unofficially, at least on the upper floors. You might get transferred up with _real_ good behavior, but going by the fact that this is your first time here and you were immediately placed with me? _Well._ ” Tattletale stretched her arms behind her head, pressing her legs out into a loose, cat-like gesture. “I wouldn’t hold out too much hope, honestly.”  
  
Taylor opened her mouth, then shut it with a click. “What happened to your last cellmate? I thought it was normally two-to-a-cell?”  
  
Tattletale crinkled her eyes and smirked, she fucking _smirked_. “I drove them out, but, maybe you’ll last longer? I mean, I don’t know.” Tattletale gave her another long, probing look that made her skin crawl. “I’m here for another two years, and my power is to just know every little thing about you and anyone else I have to interact with, for that matter. I’m sure I’ll find a way _eventually_. That or we could become _besties!_ ”  
  
Taylor clenched her fingers reflexively.  
  
Tattletale’s smile _bloomed,_ cruel and wicked. “Oh, you don’t like that _at all_.”  
  
She didn’t, and frankly, she wasn’t really in the mood for this. Her plans were quashed, her roommate was a creep, and she had to read those papers eventually, and it was probably better to do so now, rather than later. If nothing else, she couldn’t imagine it being any worse than holding a conversation with the gigantic elephant-sized bitch in the room.


End file.
